


The Life of a Mother

by JJWay



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Child Death, Children, Depression, F/M, Family, Frigga (Marvel) Feels, Marriage, Parenthood, Pregnancy, Teen Pregnancy, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 05:18:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16257449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JJWay/pseuds/JJWay
Summary: Frigga had always dreamt of having a family, with a husband and children she adored. Life unfortunately has not turned out quite as she planned.Set in the same universe as my Troubled Minds series, but do not need to read understand the story - https://archiveofourown.org/series/46100





	The Life of a Mother

**Author's Note:**

> Story is set in the same universe as Troubled Minds, but I have not added it to the series as I feel it should be kept separate as it's not set in Marvel High School at all.

Frigga had always dreamt of having of children; from a very young age she had decided that if she was to do anything in life it would be to raise a family. She dreamt of meeting her one true love and getting married in her grandparents’ home land of Sweden with her sisters Gullveig and Fulla as her bridesmaids. Frigga would continue her family’s tradition and marry based on their Old Nordic beliefs, with a handfasting first and a wedding a year and a day later. She had scrap booked her wedding day in intricate detail, an ivory dress with large sleeves, patterned in Nordic design and topped with a flower crown. They would marry on a Friday on the outskirts of the same woods her parents had married, eventually have two children and live happily ever after.

When Frigga was sixteen she met the man who would later become her husband. Thirteen years her senior, Odin Borson had approached Frigga during one her father’s medical charity fundraisers. He introduced himself with a kiss on her hand, saying he had been struck by her beauty and had to speak to her. Frigga spent the rest of the night politely speaking to Odin, he was charming and clearly very rich, and while she did not find him attractive she enjoyed the attention.

Through the days that followed Odin sent her poems of her beauty, flowers and little gifts. It was sweet…but this was not the type of man Frigga envisioned herself with. While the boys in her college held no interest to her, all much too immature, she still wanted to marry someone closer to her own age. Someone muscular, maybe in medicine like her father, who had the same desires to have a family as she did. She was only sixteen though, she had a lifetime to find the man she would marry and settle down with, why not soak up the attention Odin gave her for now. Ultimately, it was her father’s disapproval in Odin’s attention that had Frigga perusing a relationship with him.

Her father acted like she was child, while Odin made her feel like an adult. While still a child in the eyes of the law, Frigga felt older than her years; she was old enough to make her own decisions and she would prove that to her father.

Odin spoke sweetly to her over a candlelit dinner on their first date. He had taken Frigga to an expensive restaurant, with a high ceiling decorated with chandeliers, where everyone in the room was older than her by at least a decade. He held her hand across the table and told her she was beautiful; Frigga took the compliments with the same amount of grace she had seen her Aunt Freyja do on many occasions. When the meal was over Frigga accepted Odin’s offer to come back to his penthouse with him, knowing that’s what an adult would do and to some extent, after the lavish meal, feeling almost obliged to. Odin offered her more wine and they spoke further on the couch before he moved in to kiss her. They kissed slowly until Odin led her into the bedroom. Gullvieg had once told her that no respectable women had sex on the first date, but Frigga didn’t want to appear frigid or uninterested.

It wasn’t Frigga’s first time, but it was a whole new experience then the clumsy sex she’d previously had with ex-boyfriends her own age. Odin knew his way around a women’s body, knew how to make her feel good, feel like a woman. It surprised her, this older, bigger man who she wasn’t that attracted to made her feel euphoric.

The sex didn’t change Frigga’s feelings for Odin, she was not attracted to him but she did continue to allow him to court her despite her father’s growing disapproval. Odin took her shopping, buying her luxurious items that she enjoyed showing off at college the next day, where she was currently studying child care. After graduating she planned to become a nursery nurse before finding a husband and settling down with her own children. Odin tried to encourage her to leave school, stating that with her at his side she’d never have to work a day in her life. Frigga’s family was by no means poor, but they weren’t the millionaires that Odin’s family were. Her father was a Doctor and her mother a mid-wife, and her paternal grandfather used to be a fisherman in Sweden before moving his family to England. Odin on the other hand was the CEO of Asgard, an international real estate and construction company, started by his grandfather Buri in 1923. Frigga didn’t need money to be happy, all she needed was her family.

 

Three months into Frigga and Odin’s ‘relationship’ is when Frigga discovers she is six weeks pregnant. She had imagined the day she’d find out she was pregnant many times, and never had those daydreams been like her reality. Her parents were the first ones to know, and though both disapproved of her relationship with Odin they supported her. Helped her weigh her options, gave the best advice they could for her make her decision. They had been in a similar position themselves, only when Gerda found out she was pregnant at aged 18, Freyr being 17, they were both in love with one another and already engaged. They waited until after Gullveig had been born so they could marry in Sweden, the age needed there to wed being 18. Four years later they’d had Frigga, and another five had Fulla. Despite having their children starting so young, the pair had still gone on to have successful careers in medicine. Frigga loved hearing about how her parents met, how they married, how they lived their lives in the early days of creating their family, and hated that she wouldn’t be able to do that with her own child.

When she told Odin he was delighted, being now aged 39 with no children, or no heir as he put it, and his enthusiasm warmed her heart somewhat. He proposed to her within the week, with a large diamond ring that she could almost see her reflection in. Frigga didn’t accept on the spot, asking for some time to think. Her mother offered to come with her should she decided to go for an abortion; feeling uncomfortable with the idea of saying goodbye to the child that she did not yet know but already loved, Frigga knew she couldn’t go with that option. Her father said they would support her in every way should she decide to raise the child without Odin, but she hated the idea of raising her child in a spilt family. While she knew there was nothing wrong with that, her father and Aunt had been raised solo by her grandfather, but she was also very aware of her father’s hatred for his own mother, and Frigga did not want that for her child.

Frigga was young, and maybe she hadn’t considered her options thoroughly, but at aged sixteen marrying the father of her child, whom she did not love, seemed like the only reasonable choice.

The gods did not shine down on her wedding day like Frigga imagined. They got married on a windy and cloudy September day in the English countryside, not the Swedish woods like she had hoped. In the acres of land behind one of Odin’s family’s mansions, Frigga walked down the aisle seven months pregnant, at least in the wedding dress she had dreamt, with Gullveig and Fulla close behind as her bridesmaids along with her cousins Nanna and Var. Frigga held tight onto her father’s arm before he gave her away to the man who in that moment she thought one day she would grow to love, not knowing she would only come to loth and despise him.

 

On the 13th November 1992, Frigga gives birth to a baby girl she names Aldrif who her heart melts for instantly. The short strands atop of her head are vivid red, and her eyes, as she slowly blinks them open for the first time to take in the new world, are a bright blue. Frigga’s only thoughts while holding her daughter for the first time is that she is the most beautiful creature in the world.

Motherhood came easily to Frigga, as she knew it would. Odin mostly left her to it, secretly, Frigga thought, disappointed she had not had a boy. Their first Christmas together as a family, they were lavished with gifts from both Frigga and Odin’s families. Children’s toys ready for when Alrif was bigger, photo frames to decorate their newly moved into home and fill with memories, and beautiful dresses Aldrif would come to grow into. They decorated her nursery in warm gold and reds, and Frigga hand painted angle wings on the wall above her cot. Everything seemed to be coming together, and though she still had not found love for the father of her child, looking into the face of their daughter, Frigga felt she could not be happier.

As it is said to do for all things, Frigga’s happiness came to an abrupt end in the February of 1993 when one morning she was not awoken by the cries of hunger from her three month old. That cold morning Frigga woke up naturally for the first time since Aldrif’s birth and shuffled blurry eyed into Aldrif’s room. Nothing in life could have prepared her for that morning, of finding her daughter’s lifeless body.

Frigga’s screams of terror were heard by her neighbor Eir, who came rushing round, kicking in the door and finding Frigga begging her daughter to wake up. The paramedics were called, and shortly Aldrif was removed from Frigga’s arm as they tried for half an hour to breathe life back into her tiny body. Despite Frigga’s demands for them to keep trying, they pronounced Aldrif Odinsdottir dead.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, otherwise known as cot death. Frigga watched grief stricken as her baby’s too small golden coffin was lowered into the ground, for reasons that could not be explained, for something that apparently Frigga could not have prevented. It was rare, her father told her; the risks of death were low, the doctor’s told her; it only effects 200 babies in the UK a year. Then why did this have to happen to her!

Following her daughter’s death, Frigga did everything she could to avoid both her husband and the hollow feeling in her heart. She spent time raising money for charities involved in helping parents who had lost a child. Studying SIDS, trying to find out exactly what causes it, or where she’d gone wrong. Otherwise she was spending time with her Aunt Freyja, who had six daughters of her own. Nanna and Var were her eldest who had both been bridesmaids at Frigga’s wedding, Nanna was only a year younger than Frigga, Var five years younger. Then came seven year old Snorta, three year old twins Lofn and Sjofn, and lastly Syn, who was born two months after Aldrif. Frigga went to visit her Aunt under the guise of helping her with the children she knew she had no problems raising, but spent most of her time caring for Syn, holding her small body and imagining it was Aldrif.

Though it seemed unhealthy to some of those around her, Syn helps heal Frigga and readies her for spending the rest of her life without Aldrif and gradually the idea of having another child. Nothing would ever replace her daughter, and she knows having another child would not take that lost away, but a year after Aldrif’s death Frigga begins trying for another baby. It’s a struggle at first, to not feel guilty at the happiness of discovering she is pregnant again, at the love that engulfs her upon feeling her growing bump or the excitement that the thought of meeting her second child brings her. Attending meetings with the charities she had been supporting helps her understand there is no shame in moving on, that being happy was nothing to feel guilty about.

On 19th October 1994, Frigga gives birth to her son, Balder. Though his features are still small and pink, he reminds Frigga of her father and she knows he’ll turn into a very handsome man once he’s grown up. His hair is brown, and his eyes are shaped just like Freyr’s though with iris the same bright blue as Aldrif’s. Frigga didn’t believe she’d ever be able to love unconditionally again, but her eyes well up with happiness as she realizes, holding her newborn, that she loves him with all her heart. With a kiss to his forehead, Frigga promises to protect him with everything she has.

For the first six months of Balder’s life, Frigga barely sleeps, instead she watches his little chest rise and fall whilst he slumbers, panicking momentarily every time his breath is delayed by even a few seconds. When she does sleep, she does so on an airbed set up next to his crib. She had wanted to set Balder’s crib up in her and Odin’s room, but the latter had not wanted to be awoken in the middle of the night when Balder awoke for his feeds. Once Balder reaches six months, Frigga allows herself to calm down, now having reached the threshold of when the statistics say babies suffer from SIDS. It feels like a huge weight lifted from off her shoulder and finally she feels like she can live life to the fullest again.

Balder is perfect. Frigga is often stopped in the street for people to comment on how beautiful he is, and they are only further drawn in as he smiles brightly back at them. He is sociable when they attend baby groups, go visit Syn, or his cousins on Odin’s side, Tyr and Vidar. During this time Nanna also has a son named Foresti, seven months younger than Balder. For a year and a half Frigga is the happiest she has ever been, raising Balder leaves her feeling fulfilled, and during this time she even grows to tolerate Odin. Then, she falls pregnant again.

 

Frigga suffers terribly during this pregnancy, in a way she hadn’t with either Aldrif or Balder. Every morning she is sick, her feet start to swell, her back and breasts ache and she is tired all the time. It breaks her heart to see Balder’s crestfallen face when she is too exhausted to play with him when he asked her to, and prays to the Gods for this pregnancy to ease up or end soon.

The end comes on 11th August 1996 at the birth of her second son Thor. His hair is golden much like her own, and his eyes shine that familiar blue. But when Frigga stares into the face of her newborn…she feels empty. Not the love she did for her first two, no desire to hold him close and never let go. She is quick to pass him over to Odin when he comes to visit, and allows the midwives to take him away for bottle feeds rather than breast feeding him herself.

This feeling, or lack thereof, it’s not like her. At first Frigga tells herself she’s just tried, but even returning home and taking Balder into her arms does not bring her the same joy as it always would. The first two weeks are the easiest, as everyone from her family and Odin’s comes round to see Thor. Frigga’s able to remove herself from the room while they coo at him and entertain Balder, within those two weeks Frigga probably holds Thor less than anyone else. Then she’s on her own. Her days seem to pass in a routine haze, no longer feeling the same fulfillment in raising her boys as she had before. She doesn’t take the same care with Thor as she had with Balder, sometimes she ignores him as he cries, not caring enough to go see him, sometimes she yells at him to shut up and cries herself when he doesn’t.

It’s not right, it’s not her; all Frigga had ever wanted was to raise her own children, and she knows she enjoys it, she had before. What’s wrong with her now? Frigga raises her concerns to her health visitor when she comes on a routined check up on Thor’s development. She waves it off as baby blues, says it’ll pass and it’s nothing to worry about, and Frigga accepts that as the reason why she feels no joy when Thor is described as perfectly healthy and progressing fantastically.

Thor is three months old, the same age as Aldrif when she passed, when Frigga stares down at him blankly in his cot and wishes, prays to the Gods that she could swap him and have her daughter back. The thought washes over her for a long moment before something snaps in her brain and brings her crashing back to reality. The sinister notion terrifies her, and disgusted with herself Frigga quickly steps back from the crib, fearing for his safety around her. The next day Frigga invites her mother round for advice, hoping her nineteen years’ worth of experience as a midwife would explain what’s going on with her.

Postnatal Depression is what her mother diagnoses her with, a condition the medical community did not yet take seriously. Her father prescribed Frigga with antidepressants and points her in the direction of support groups, Fulla offering to look after her sons for her while she attends. It takes a few weeks, but Frigga gradually begins to feel like herself. It was like finally taking a deep breath after drowning for so long. Frigga showers Thor with kisses every day to make up for the months they had missed bonding, she blows raspberries on his chubby baby tummy which produce the most beautiful belly laugh, music to her ears. Finally she was able to hold him close and feel her heart swell with the love she couldn’t believe she hadn’t felt before.

With Thor cradled in one arm and Balder curled up against her side, Frigga finally felt complete. She didn’t have the marriage she wanted, and while she didn’t yet love Odin he had given her three beautiful children, two she’d protect with her dying breath and one she’d never forget, and for that she was grateful.

 

Balder now three and Thor one, Frigga really had her hands full. Though still a sweetheart, Balder was now fully talking and had become very inquisitive. Everything was ‘why’. He was constantly questioning, and while Frigga tried to give answers to everything Balder wanted to know, after four ‘why’s in row she was running out of answers and patience. Then there was Thor, who was just a little whirlwind of energy. Looking after two children was lot easier when one of them couldn’t move on their own. Thor was now always running, climbing, jumping, tripping over his tiny legs and getting unexplainably dirty. Plus he was loud, so loud.

One night in November 1997 Frigga had not long gotten the two in bed when Odin arrived home about to shake Frigga’s life up. By now she was exhausted and just needed an hour to herself before tidying up then house and retiring to bed herself; the last thing she wanted to do was deal with her husband. Frigga was putting on her well-practiced fake smile when Odin comes into the living, and her greeting is cut short when she notices the baby carrier he is carrying in his right hand.

A baby, a three month old baby boy her husband had brought home with him. Odin had not shown any desire to have any more children, he barely spent time with the ones he had, and nor had he proved himself to be a compassionate person. And yet, here he was with a child he stated has been mistreated by his parents and had been removed from his home by social services. Apparently a friend of Odin’s had contacted him for help placing the child in a good home, and he’d readily agreed to care for him himself.

This story sounded like bullshit to Frigga, she was sure that wasn’t how social services worked or that Odin knew anyone who worked with them. Where had the babe truly come from? Frigga wondered if maybe the child was really Odin’s, if he’d slept with another women got them pregnant and been lumbered with the outcome. She was furious, not at the idea of Odin cheating on her, she’d rather he sleep with someone else than her, she was angry because it wouldn’t be Odin caring for this stray child it’d be her.

They quickly got into a heated argument, Frigga saying she could barely cope with her own children as it is, with two toddlers she couldn’t take on the reasonability of an infant iswell, especially so suddenly with no time to prepare. She couldn’t and she wouldn’t. Odin yelled some choice words back, the sound of his booming voice waking the slumbering babe and causing him to cry. He puts down the carrier none too gently, ordering Frigga to take care of the child before storming out of the room and locking himself in his study where he spent most of his time when he was at home.

Frigga breaths angrily and runs her fingers through her hair. She’s never hated her husband more than she does now. Taking deep breaths she tries to calm herself down before dealing with the screaming child. This was insanity. Where were they going to put him to bed? Was she expected to breastfeed somebody else’s child? They didn’t have anything else to feed him. They had no clothes, all Thor and Balder’s old ones had been given to charity, and they didn’t have diapers that would fit him. And what was she supposed to tell the boys in the morning? How was she going to explain where this baby had come from?

With her mouth full of distaste, Frigga bent down to take the baby out of the carrier and shush him softly, she couldn’t just leave him to cry on his own. As she rocked him slowly in her arms he began to calm down almost instantly. The boy opened his eyes, staring up at her with wet green eyes that shined like emeralds. He was so small, smaller than her own children had been at this age, Thor might even have been bigger than this when he was born. His skin was porcelain, made even whiter by the stark constant of his tufts of midnight hair. Frigga took a shaky breath and moved back to sit on the sofa, suddenly scared of dropping him. As they stared into each other’s eyes, Frigga felt her heart melt and unexplained love bloom in her chest.

 

Maybe Frigga was just weak to babies, or maybe there was something special about the baby she would the next day discover was named Loki; but she felt a bond with him, a need to protect. Maybe it was because he wasn’t Odin’s, she couldn’t see any of the man she hated in the child, and would later secretly do a DNA test just to be sure.

Though she had not given birth to him, Loki would quickly become Frigga’s favourite child. Her conscious told her she should find out where he truly came from, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so, selfishly wanting to keep him all to herself. Holding him brought a calm to her the others hadn’t and as irrational as it sounded, she felt they were one in the same; taken and trapped by Odin.

Life hadn’t turned out quite the way Frigga had dreamt as a child, but life wasn’t the sunshine and rainbows she thought it was a child. Life was difficult and the hardships that came with it didn’t care who you were or what dreams you had. Frigga looked back at the memory of her teenage self sometimes and wonders if she’d be happier had she listened to her father and ignored Odin. These thoughts come and go quickly however, as she looks at her three beautiful children and knows she wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> I hoped you enjoyed, I've wanted to write something with Frigga and her children for a while now, and I love building up my Universe. 
> 
> I'm thinking of adding further chapters to this, so be sure to look out for more if you enjoyed it! :)


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